Technology | The Guardian

In our undemocratic digital world, people have little power to shape the tools that affect their lives. But tech workers could change thatAn unprecedented wave of rank-and-file rebellion is sweeping Big Tech. At one company after another, employees are refusing to help the US government commit human rights abuses at home and abroad.At Google, workers organized to shut down Project Maven, a Pentagon project that uses machine learning to improve targeting for drone strikes – and won. At Amazon, workers are pushing Jeff Bezos to stop selling facial recognition to police departments and government agencies, and to cut ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). At Microsoft, workers are demanding the termination of a $19.4m cloud deal with Ice. At Salesforce, workers are trying to kill the company’s contract with Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Continue reading...

The trend, labelled ‘Snapchat dysmorphia’, suggests some people are experiencing a worrying blur between reality and social mediaPlastic surgeons are reporting that patients are coming to them with selfies of themselves edited using the filters on Snapchat or Instagram and asking to look more like the retouched photo.Researchers at the Boston medical center have authored an article in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, which labels the trend “Snapchat dysmorphia” and argues that filters on apps are having a disastrous impact on people’s self-esteem. Continue reading...

A buy-out could be done, but may not be the paradise the entrepreneur imaginesTesla’s Elon Musk isn’t the first chief executive to be infuriated by short-sellers, or to grumble about swings in the share price, or to complain that the outside world is stupidly obsessed by quarterly earnings figures. Prod most bosses of quoted companies and you’ll hear similar grumbles. The stock market can be ridiculously short-termist.In Tesla’s case, the complaint sounds roughly fair. Musk declared in his email to staff that Tesla “is the most shorted stock in the history of the stock market”. Short positions have equated to 25% of the share capital, currently implying $10bn-plus of bets that the electric car company is over-valued or will fail. Continue reading...

Statement from board members suggests Musk’s tweets – which prompted surge in price – were less spontaneous than imaginedTesla directors have said they knew about Elon Musk’s surprise proposal to privatise the money-losing car maker before he tweeted about it and have met several times in the past week to discuss the proposal.Related: Tesla shares soar after Elon Musk floats plan to take company private Continue reading...

The developer talks about Super Smash Bros Ultimate, the ‘eternal appeal of gaming’ and the challenge of appealing to casual fans and pros at the same timeMasahiro Sakurai is 48 years old, but looks almost ageless. In his face, you can see the prodigious teenager he once was. Sakurai was 19 when he directed his first game, Kirby’s Dream Land, at HAL Laboratory, a Tokyo developer that made a string of excellent games for Nintendo’s consoles in the 90s. His parents were perplexed; in their generation, video games didn’t exist. “They never supported me actively, there was a lot of uncertainty and fear,” he recalls. “That said, after I worked on the Kirby games, I noticed that all of a sudden my parents had Kirby paraphernalia hanging around the house.”At his own company, Sora Ltd, Sakurai is now the director and public face of Smash Bros, Nintendo’s chaotic fighting game that features characters from throughout its 35-plus-year history alongside special guests from elsewhere in the gaming world, such as Final Fantasy’s Cloud, Sonic and Metal Gear Solid’s Snake. He is a calm presence in Nintendo Direct broadcasts, which deliver a drip-feed of information to fans, going into almost comically deep detail on characters’ moves and animations and occasionally betraying a deadpan sense of humour. Continue reading...

Musk tweets plan as it emerges Saudi Arabia has built up $2.9bn stake in tech giantElon Musk has launched a campaign to take Tesla private on a day that included several provocative tweets, a suspension (and resumption) of trading in the company’s shares, reports of a significant Saudi investment, a surge in stock price, and an evocative, Musk-tinged appeal to the Tesla faithful: “The future is very bright and we’ll keep fighting to achieve our mission.”The ride started with Tesla’s stock rising more than 7% after Musk tweeted he was “considering taking Tesla private” and had funding in place to do so at a price of $420 (£325) per share. Shortly afterwards, Tesla published a blogpost written by Musk entitled ‘Taking Tesla private’ that had been sent to all employees. Continue reading...

ONS says 89% of UK adults go online at least weekly but have lack of awareness over safetyInternet use in Britain has risen to record levels but there is a worrying lack of awareness around security, figures show.The Office for National Statistics (ONS) found 89% of adults used the internet at least weekly this year, a rise of one percentage point on last year and up from 51% in 2006. Continue reading...

This fast-paced taster of the next Call of Duty is a good indication of how the long-running shooter is trying to moderniseOh God, it’s fast. It’s so fast. After a month playing mostly Fortnite (with the odd quick foray into Overwatch to remind me what “proper” shooters are like), the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 beta feels like jumping on to one of those holiday park waterslides and realising that you are are travelling at 4omph down a rickety plastic tube maintained by surly teenagers in flip-flops. Anything could happen – and it could happen really quickly.Of course, Call of Duty has always been slick, maintaining a 60fps frame rate and an endless spawn-kill-die dynamic, but its developer, Treyarch, has upped the speed even further for this iteration. On five small maps, players are in conflict within seconds of kick-off and remain there for the duration of the bout. It is the Napalm Death of game pacing. Continue reading...

Company first in Britain to offer choice of private hire car or black cab through same appIndia’s biggest ride-hailing firm, Ola, is taking on Uber in the UK with plans to roll out its service across the country by the end of the year.The firm is to launch in Cardiff, Newport and Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales within the next month, followed by Greater Manchester, after obtaining operating licences, and is working with local authorities to expand nationwide. Continue reading...

Google’s new mobile OS is rolling out to a select group of phones. Here’s the lowdown on the new featuresGoogle’s next version of Android finally has a name: “Pie”. It’s rolling out right now and is packed with new features, from extended battery life to new gesture navigation.Pie marks one of the biggest changes in the way Android looks and feels in some years, with a more colourful interface, a collection of new movement animations and rounded edges on almost everything. Thankfully, it’s still as fast as Android Oreo, at least on Google’s Pixel smartphones. Continue reading...

Southgate primary in West Sussex is one of many British schools bringing games into the classroom, with staff seeing benefits for parents as well as studentsAt the end of the summer term at Southgate primary school in Crawley, West Sussex, a class of 10-year-olds are folding together cardboard models of remote-controlled cars and decorating them with pipe cleaners, pens, googly eyes and tape, with the aim of using them to transport a biscuit across a table and into the open mouths of their teachers.The kids are playing with Nintendo Labo, an ingenious game that comes with a box of fold-up cardboard models that turn from inert facsimiles into working toys, with the addition of a Nintendo Switch console. Snap two controllers on to a cardboard car and it judders across the table. A cardboard piano becomes a working keyboard with a screen. A cardboard fishing rod can be used to play a fishing game, attached by string to a base housing the console. They are fun to play with, but they also teach engineering principles – the software includes a child-friendly but comprehensive breakdown of how the console uses features such as vibration, infrared cameras and gyroscopes to make the models work. Continue reading...

Guardian readers respond to reports of tech giant Amazon’s halved corporation tax billAmazon’s implication that its corporate tax payments in the UK are very low partly because of its high investments in this country is both misleading and disingenuous (Amazon halves UK corporation tax bill to £4.5m as profits treble, 3 August). Investments in, for example, buildings and machinery are financed by a combination of loans, shareholders’ funds and net earnings – crucially – after tax.In other words, investments do not reduce a company’s tax liability except by very minor amounts of later depreciation. For the bewildered public, this disingenuousness is compounded by the failure of media commentators to press Amazon accordingly to justify its explanation.

Crackdown on US conspiracy theorist for promoting violence and hate speechAll but one of the major content platforms have banned the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as the companies raced to act in the wake of Apple’s decision to remove five podcasts by Jones and his Infowars website.Facebook unpublished four pages run by Jones for “repeated violations of community standards”, the company said on Monday. YouTube terminated Jones’s account over him repeatedly appearing in videos despite being subject to a 90-day ban from the website, and Spotify removed the entirety of one of Jones’s podcasts for “hate content”. Continue reading...

The game designer discusses swapping horror for a strange VR adventure game about fairies, inspired by manga and Celtic folkloreThe downside to making something critically revered and loved by millions is that it isn’t easy to get out from under its shadow. For Hidetaka Miyazaki and the game development studio he now leads, FromSoftware, Dark Souls was a golden ticket. In 2004, Miyazaki was a designer on the Armored Core series of mech games. By 2015, he was the company’s president and the games he has directed – Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodborne – have been lauded as some of the greatest of the modern era.Now, finally freed from the Dark Souls series, which came to an end (for the time being, at least) in 2016, FromSoftware has previewed two brand new games this year. One of them, the samurai-themed action game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, shares a lot of the DNA of Dark Souls: intense, violent combat, a ravaged setting full of fallen creatures, and cleverly designed locations that interlock and wrap around themselves. The other, Déraciné, is a VR adventure game about fairies. Both are under Miyazaki’s creative direction, and represent a way forward for the developer. But the inspiration for Déraciné came from looking back. Continue reading...

Ever wanted to contribute to research? All people-powered science requires is a phone or computer and a sharp eyeThe Big Butterfly Count is the largest project of its type. It is on track to exceed last year’s total of more than 62,000 submitted counts. People participate by counting the number and type of butterflies seen in one spot over 15 minutes. Butterfly Conservation is using the data to track conservation work and the health of the environment as a whole. Continue reading...

Even after 40 years and 14m cars manufactured, the latest model of this great little car still manages to surprise and impressVW Polo

A startling stock-market landmark for Apple has been offset by big falls for Facebook and Twitter. Is this tumultuous period just a blip, or the first sign of trouble?It has been a tumultuous couple of weeks for America’s high-flying technology stocks, even by their own unique standards. Their shares have been soaring since the start of the year, despite being buffeted by trade war fears as President Trump talked of limiting Chinese investments in the US and restricting American technology imports to China.But now there are signs that cracks may be starting to appear in some of the biggest firms in the sector. Facebook suffered the biggest ever one-day drop in a company’s market value – losing more than £90bn – after its growth slowed in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Continue reading...

Crafty and creative hacks, apps and bits of kit to use with your Amazon Echo and its avatarSmart speakers are taking over British homes. A recent YouGov survey found the number had doubled in three months, with around 10% of Brits owning one – and that 75% of these were Amazon Echo devices. The overwhelming majority are used for basic tasks like playing music and answering general knowledge questions – but with the right tips, tricks, skills and accessories you can get the Echo’s digital assistant Alexa to do just about anything… Continue reading...

The service has millions of satisfied customers – but when it goes wrong holidays are ruinedI got £1,500 compensation when I threatened legal action after a villa disasterWhen Damian White and family finally arrived at the three-bed villa in Portimão, Portugal, they booked through Airbnb – after spending hours searching for it with incomplete address details – they didn’t realise this was just the start of their holiday from hell. Continue reading...

Sarah Jeong is the latest public figure to pay the price for postings on Twitter that are resurfaced years laterLess than 24 hours after it was announced that Sarah Jeong was to join the editorial board of the New York Times, the reporter was embroiled a row over the nature of racism. Old tweets in which Jeong, a reporter for the tech website the Verge who is of Korean heritage, criticized and made jokes about white people were resurfaced on a rightwing blog run by Jim Hoft.

Revelation comes after US company posts record $2.5bn profit in most recent quarterAmazon has revealed that its UK corporation tax bill almost halved to £4.5m last year, days after the US company posted a record profit of $2.5bn (£1.9bn) in its most recent quarter.

The power of global corporations and the rise of the right are scrutinised in a novel that explores current anxieties with a cold and horrified eyeAs the UK trembles endlessly on the long drawn-out brink of Brexit, Sam Byers imagines what might come after. His furiously smart near-future satire is set partly in the fictional everytown of Edmundsbury, and partly in the digital world, from the shallows of Twitter to the murky depths of multinational tech companies. It’s both a rollicking farce of political exhaustion and social collapse, and a subtle investigation into the slippery, ever-evolving relationship between words and deeds.Sleepy Edmundsbury is under pressure from outside forces: global tech giant Green is quietly insinuating itself into the town’s infrastructure, while building company Downton is strong-arming the last remaining residents out of the crumbling Larchwood housing estate with an eye on redevelopment. And then a van draws up in the market square, and masked men calling themselves “the Griefers” stage a happening that appears to hold residents to digital ransom, displaying tantalising screenshots with the slogan “What don’t you want to share?” As a demonstration that “the cosy little box we’ve all fashioned to pour our ids into isn’t as secure as we thought”, they ask that one person from the town step forward to offer up their web history, or victims will be exposed at random. Continue reading...

Phones are increasingly being used for anything but their original purpose – having a chat with a friendStatistics illustrating our addiction to our smartphones come out quite frequently and receive a lot of attention for information so unsurprising; it will come as no shock to anyone that the average Briton checks her phone every 12 minutes. Indeed, I’d like to pick a fight with the blandness of the questions asked in Ofcom’s latest telecommunications report. I wish they’d included: “Have you ever picked up your phone to Google where your phone is?” Or: “Have you ever smashed or otherwise been suddenly deprived of your phone, and wanted to stand in the street howling like a wolf?”The report belongs in the news category “things we already knew, but are worried about, so will continue to pick at like a scab”. Yet there is one new element to our behaviour: we’ve stopped using telephones for talking to one another. The number of calls made dropped for the first time in 2017. It’s not a huge drop – 1.7% – and the figure may be misleading since calls made on WhatsApp and Facebook weren’t counted. Three-quarters of people still believe that voice calls are important. But that’s not as many – 92% – as the number who value their phones mainly for internet access. Continue reading...

Computing and mobile phone giant beats Amazon to landmark after its shares hit $207.05Apple became the world’s first trillion-dollar public company on Thursday, as a rise in its share price pushed it past the landmark valuation.The iMac to iPhone company, co-founded to sell personal computers by the late Steve Jobs in 1976, reached the historic milestone as its shares hit $207.05, the day after it posted strong financial results. Apple’s share price has grown fourfold since Tim Cook replaced Jobs as chief executive in 2011. Continue reading...

As Apple becomes the first company to break $1tn market cap barrier its progress from garage-based startup to the all-conquering global company it is today can be charted in six products. Here are the computers, music players, smartphones and tablets that made Apple Continue reading...

Over 42 years, the company has created an ‘app economy’ and placed itself at the centre of itFew companies change the world, and fewer still do it more than once. Apple is one of them, with a string of products over its 42-year history that have revolutionised computing, upended industries and ultimately reshaped society.Related: Apple becomes world's first trillion dollar company Continue reading...

Hackers access usernames, passwords and email addresses in breach of one of world’s biggest websitesReddit has suffered a data breach compromising usernames, passwords and email addresses of groups of users, the site has confirmed.While the size of the breach has yet to be clarified, Reddit said two data sets had been accessed by hackers, including one from 2007 containing account details and all public and private posts between 2005 and May 2007. Continue reading...

AB wants a new laptop for his studies and has narrowed the choice to two Lenovo ThinkPads. Which would suit him best?I enter grad school this fall, and plan to upgrade my 2015 MacBook Air. After a lot of research, I’ve narrowed it down to the ThinkPad T480 and the sixth-generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon. With modifications and warranties, both fall within my €1,800 (£1,599) budget, with the T480 being marginally cheaper. However, being a student, portability is a major priority. The X1 is certainly lighter at about 1.2kg, but how much of a difference will this make in practical terms?Keyboard quality is another prerequisite, with reviews proving inconclusive. Which device would be a better bet?These two 14in laptops should not be comparable, because they are based on completely different design philosophies. It’s a testament to the progress made in reducing the size and weight of traditional laptops that they are now surprisingly close.

Xbox One, PC, PS4; Hello Games

Study reveals dramatic rise in addiction to technology, as average Briton checks a mobile phone every 12 minutesThe average Briton now checks a mobile phone every 12 minutes and is online for 24 hours a week, finds an Ofcom study revealing the extent to which people now rely on the internet.Ofcom also found that, for the first time, the time spent making phone calls from mobile phones fell, as users instead used messaging services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Continue reading...

iPhone manufacturer drops to third after Chinese company splits Samsung and Apple for first time in seven yearsHuawei overtook Apple to become the world’s second-largest smartphone seller behind Samsung in the second quarter, the first time in seven years that any contender has managed to split the top two.Multiple market analysts said that Huawei’s rise came as the slowdown in China, the world’s largest market for smartphones, eased, with growing market share in Europe. Huawei failed in its recent bid to launch in the US after government action against companies deemed a security threat. Continue reading...

Firms says aim is to give users more control over the time they spend on their platformsFacebook and Instagram are to introduce tools to help users manage their time on the social networks, Facebook has announced.The tools will let people set themselves time limits for using the apps, mute notifications temporarily and view a dashboard showing their use. Continue reading...

We are too smart to be manipulated by algorithms, argues a mathematican. But the maths misses the crisis we are facing“Space is big,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”Adams’s assertion comes repeatedly to mind when reading David Sumpter’s Outnumbered, which attempts to reckon with the sheer scale of the systems that manage much of our digital lives. It’s easy, when faced with the numbers at hand, to succumb to a kind of vertigo: Facebook has two billion users, who make tens of millions of posts every hour. From this data, along with millions more photos, likes and relationships, Facebook builds models of all of us that extend in hundreds of dimensions – the puny human mind, at best, is capable of visualising four. Continue reading...

Firm sued Martin Tripp after Elon Musk claimed the ex-technician had attacked Tesla computer systemsThe Tesla “whistleblower” who was accused of sabotage has filed a counterclaim against Tesla and Elon Musk, arguing that his former employer defamed him when it told media outlets that he had threatened a mass shooting.Martin Tripp, a former technician at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada, was sued by the electric car company on 20 June, just days after Musk had sent a company email stating that an employee had engaged in “quite extensive and damaging sabotage” against the company’s computer systems. Continue reading...

Tech giant reported a $11.5bn profit, up 32% from the same period last year, and sales increased 17% to $53.3bn, a new recordApple Inc reported better than expected sales figures for the third quarter, pushing shares of the iPhone giant higher and easing the value of the company up from $935bn toward the symbolic $1tn threshold.“Growth was strong all around the world,” Apple finance chief Luca Maestri said. Continue reading...

Company reports ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ as it deletes 32 political pages and accountsFacebook has detected “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” before the United States midterm elections that could be linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian-based group with ties to the Kremlin.On Tuesday, the social network removed 32 pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram that were pushing American political stances and organising events, including a protest against a Unite the Right rally due to take place in Washington next week. Continue reading...

Online crime is borderless, and so must be our response. We cannot fight back if we are isolated and fragmentedThe safety of our online lives has become increasingly important. Whether it be interference in elections, attacks by hostile forces, or online fraud, the security of the web feels fragile. Cybersecurity has reached a crossroads and we need to decide where it goes next. The outcome will touch each of us – will we pay more and yet still be less safe? Will we face higher insurance premiums and bank charges to cover the rising number of cyber-incidents? We stand in the middle of a storm – not just a geopolitical one, but a cyberpolitical one. It feels as if no one trusts anyone any more, and suspicion and confusion reign across our delicate cyberworld. Which way do we turn?As in many classic tales, there are two roads ahead. In one direction lies “Balkanisation”: the fragmentation and isolation of an industry. Balkanisation is a natural response to fear and mistrust; when we’re scared we go home and lock the doors. But for cybersecurity, Balkanisation means growing political intervention and a breakdown of international projects and cooperation. This could leave every country effectively facing global cyberthreats on its own. For consumers it could mean higher costs as businesses seek to recoup money lost to cybercrime, as well as reduced protection because competition and choice are restricted. Continue reading...

Finance sector is second, with criminal attacks and human error playing significant roles in both sectors

As the multimillion-dollar industry’s worth and growth have accelerated, regulators have struggled to clamp down on illegal gamblingIn 2017, the global eSports economy was estimated to stand at around $696m, attracting an audience of over 385 million people, according to Newzoo. But the industry’s formidable growth has attracted more than just hordes of professional gamers, avid viewers and brands offering lucrative sponsorship deals.Organised criminals and low-level chancers have seen an opportunity to influence match outcomes and profit from them in betting markets. As the industry has grown, a string of match-fixing scandals have unfolded, embroiling some of the most prestigious competitive gaming tournaments. Continue reading...

The sprawling internet theory, beloved by Trump supporters, has ensnared everyone from Tom Hanks to Hillary Clinton

Damian Hinds to address parents’ concerns about screen time in first major speech on social mobilityMore than a quarter of children starting primary school are unable to communicate in full sentences as concerns grow about the amount of time they are spending in front of screens, the education secretary will say in his first major speech on social mobility.Damian Hinds is expected to say on Tuesday that he wants to harness technology so parents can do more to help their children’s early language development. Continue reading...

Advertising watchdog launches formal investigation over description of productThe Advertising Standards Authority has launched a formal investigation into marketing for a Swedish app that claims to be an effective method of contraception, after reports that women have become pregnant while using it.

After hi-tech won Trump the presidency, Jessica Alter wanted to put the Democrats on a stronger footing. She shares what she has learnedJessica Alter is the co-founder of Tech for Campaigns, a 7,000-strong volunteer organisation that enables Silicon Valley employees to use their digital skills to help Democratic election candidates. “The aim is to become a permanent digital arm for progressive and centrist campaigns, and give access to campaigns at any level to the people, technology and resources they need,” she says.What led you to start Tech for Campaigns. Was it the aftermath of the 2016 election?

Research exposes the male-dominated, pro-western worldview of the online encyclopediaOver the last year, scientist Jess Wade has taken to the keyboard to rectify gender bias on Wikipedia. She has written more than 270 entries about forgotten but influential women in science – such as Susan Goldberg, the first female editor of National Geographic. Research shows just 16% of Wikipedia editors are female and only 17% of entries dedicated to notable people are for women. Continue reading...

They already perform remotely controlled operations – now robots look set to be the physicians of the futureLike all everyday miracles of technology, the longer you watch a robot perform surgery on a human being, the more it begins to look like an inevitable natural wonder.Earlier this month I was in an operating theatre at University College Hospital in central London watching a 59-year-old man from Potters Bar having his cancerous prostate gland removed by the four dexterous metal arms of an American-made machine, in what is likely a glimpse of the future of most surgical procedures. Continue reading...

This mighty new coupé is a real head-turner, has a lavish interior and a real firecracker of an engine… just don’t lose the keyLexus LC 500

Select committee criticises Facebook response and urges tighter internet regulationThe DCMS select committee’s far-reaching interim report on its 18-month investigation into fake news and the use of data and “dark ads” in elections offers a wide-ranging, informed and sustained critique that carries with it the full weight of parliament. The verdict is withering: Facebook failed. It “obfuscated”, refused to investigate how its platform was abused by the Russian government until forced by pressure from Senate committees and, in the most damning section, it aided and abetted the incitement of racial hatred in Burma, noting that even the company’s chief technical officer, Mike Schroepfer, called this “awful”. Continue reading...